Salesforce Developer Wiki Retirement

Years ago, the Salesforce Developer Wiki was a trove of valuable technical resources but these days, there is a good part of those 1.6k pages that is now obsolete and duplicated by our documentation. We concluded that it was time to act for the sake of the quality and relevance of our technical resources.

After more than a decade of loyal services, it is now time to retire the Salesforce Developer Wiki.

Over the last few months, we’ve been scaling down the importance of the wiki by gradually unlinking it from our other sites. However, search engines keep on redirecting users to wiki content so we now need to make the final push and fully decommission it.

History

The Salesforce Developer Wiki was created more than ten years ago. It used to be the source of our developer documentation but it was also used for other purposes such as tutorials, blog posts and surveys.

What was great about it was the fact that it was written collaboratively by the community. This gave us good content with diverse point of views from a great variety of sources. Unfortunately, this collaborative nature also led to its downfall as it takes several full-time jobs, a few processes, and a robust strategy to structure and maintain such vast content. For example: each new release required a plan and resources to systematically review existing content and develop new content for newly released features.

As our company grew, we put in place strong content delivery and maintenance processes with dedicated documentation teams. We shifted our focus towards internally maintained documentation sites while reducing our efforts around the wiki. We felt that third-party sites and our blog would continue to provide diverse insights but that we needed to streamline coverage of our features.

Our plan

The Developer Wiki still holds unique and valuable content so we are taking care of preserving this precious knowledge. After carefully reviewing its content, we ended up redirecting and transferring most of it between:

We investigated and retired more than a hundred Developer Wiki links from 41 Trailhead modules and projects. This initiative guarantees the quality of your learning experience after we fully decommission the Developer Wiki (Meaning #No404Error).

Share your feedback

We would love to hear from you. Feel free to share your Developer Wiki experience and thoughts by commenting on this post.